featured book

featured book

The Aleph and Other Stories

Format

Paperback

Price

$16.00

Paperback

ISBN 9780142437889

224 Pages

27 Jul 2004

Penguin Classics

18 and up

Overview

Full of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises, these stories contain some of Borges’s most fully realized human characters. With uncanny insight he takes us inside the minds of an unrepentant Nazi, an imprisoned Mayan priest, fanatical Christian theologians, a woman plotting vengeance on her father’s “killer,” and a man awaiting his assassin in a Buenos Aires guest house. This volume also contains the hauntingly brief vignettes about literary imagination and personal identity collected in The Maker, which Borges wrote as failing eyesight and public fame began to undermine his sense of self.

The Aleph and Other Stories

Praise

“He more than anyone renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists. Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, and Mario Vargas Llosa have all acknowledged their debt to him.” —J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books

“He has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place.” —John Updike

Table of Contents

The Aleph and Other StoriesIntroduction by Andrew Hurley

The Aleph (1949)

The ImmortalThe Dead ManThe TheologiansStory of the Warrior and the Captive MaidenA Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)Emma ZunzThe House of AsterionThe Other DeathDeutsches RequiemAverroës’ SearchThe ZahirThe Writing of the GodIbn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His LabyrinthThe Two Kings and the Two LabyrinthsThe WaitThe Man on the ThresholdThe AlephAfterword

The Maker (1960)

Foreword: For Leopold LugonesThe MakerDreamtigersA Dialog About a DialogToenailsCovered MirrorsArgumentum OrnithologicumThe CaptiveThe MountebankDelia Elena San MarcoA Dialog Between Dead MenThe PlotA ProblemThe Yellow Rose The WitnessMartin FierroMutationsParable of Cervantes and the QuixoteParadiso, XXXI, 108Parable of the PalaceEverything and NothingRagnarökInferno, I, 32Borges and I